lundi 19 mars 2012

Francis K. goes HollywOUD

Francis Kurkdjian has a half-dozen of us squeezed into his tiny, sparely
chic Maison Francis Kurkdjian Parisian boutique on the rue d’Alger.Today, he is presenting his brand-new scent. An oud. Now, he knows that we know that oud isn't a trend so much as a geyser. So why has he, an independent with his very own perfume house, chosen to work on it?

He was asked to, plain
and simple, he finally admits -- even an independent perfume house has got its financial backers, and the Middle-East is still the market to court. The tricky bit for Francis K. wasn't so much that he was asked to work on a specific product, since that's what perfumers do throughout their career. It's that he never uses a raw material to
spark off his inspiration: he starts off with a story or a person. So that his
Oud had to be reverse-engineered into
a story – visions of Lawrence of Arabia; of a “gold and marble palace” in the
dunes; of pyramids in sandstorms. As a nod to the the fact that he was deliberately indulging in a Oriental fantasy, he gave
his perfume-in-progress the tongue in cheek working title “Hollywoud”.

He
finally opted for just plain “Oud”, he
explains, because he wanted to claim oud both as part of the perfumer’s palette
– he calls it “the ambergris of the 21st century” – and as a genre,
just as Guerlain or Carven claimed vetiver in the 1950s. Which meant extracting
oud from the French-Arabian family designed to court the Middle-Eastern market –
since he’d already done rose-patchouli in the his-and-hers Lumière Noire, the
classic oud-rose accord wasn’t an option anyway. Taming it. Reinventing it in
his own idiom. Teaching it to speak French.

As a result, Kurkdjian admits his Oud isn’t quite hairy-chested enough to
appeal to the Middle-East though, unlike most Western fragrances built around
the theme, it does contains the real stuff. He says he wanted to treat it in watercolour
tones, so he’s shorn it of the smelly-shoe, badly cured goatskin rug facets oud
can sometimes give off. His palace-in-the-dunes vision suggested golden,
silky textures, which he achieved by stretching out his oud on a wooden frame. The
“strawberry jam and warm wood jam” effects of Atlas cedar wood act
horizontally, while patchouli forms the vertical axis. The zesty, peppery elemi
resin adds shimmer to the top notes – the vibrancy of minute sand grains
blowing in the wind. The spicy shimmer is picked up by saffron, which bolsters
the leathery facet of oud with its own. A drop of vanilla adds comfort and
blends with oud’s naturally honeyed tinge, reminiscent of civet…

Maison Francis Kurddjian Oud achieves what its author intended, with leathery, animalic
nuances that bring out the more elegant facets of its core material – more of a
desert wind blowing into a fine-spun veil than hardcore olfactory exotica, and
considerably tamer than the after-hours Absolue pour le Soir. In fact, this may
well be an oud for the oud-averse, or for people with a yen for delicate,
oriental leather scents.

4 commentaires:

I am always giving oud scents a chance and if it comes from FK, it gets a double chance. I suspect my love for By Kilian's Pure Oud will remain unchallenged, but I agree that a lot can be done with this material in all sorts of different and interesting directions.

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Denyse Beaulieu

I am a writer and translator based in Paris, as well as the perfume editor for Citizen K. My book The Perfume Lover, A Personal History of Scent is published by Harper Collins (UK), St. Martin's Press (USA) and Penguin (Canada). The perfume linked to the book,Séville à l'aube, was composed by Bertrand Duchaufour for L'Artisan Parfumeur.